The State of the Art(47)

of unreality the city inspired, the sense of

continually stepping from one continuum to

another.Instead of the West running everything on

its side, and the East everything on its, the East ran

the S-bahn (above ground) on both sides, the West

the U-bahn (underground) on both sides; the U-

bahn served those ghostly stations under the East

and the S-bahn had its own tumbledown, weed-

strewn stations in the West.Both ignored the wall,

indeed, because the S-bahn went over the top of

it.And the S-bahn went underground in places.And

the U-bahn surfaced frequently.Let me labour the

point and say that even double-decker buses and

double-decker trains added to the sense of a multi-

layered reality.In a place like Berlin, wrapping the

Reichstag up like a parcel wasn't even remotely as

weird an idea as the city was itself.

I went once via Friedrichstrasse and once through

Checkpoint Charlie, into the East.Sure enough,

there were places where time seemed to have

stopped there too, and many of the buildings and

signs looked as though a patina of dust had started

settling over them thirty years ago, and never been

disturbed since.There were shops in the East

where one could only spend foreign

currency.Somehow they just didn't look like real

shops; it was as though some seedy entrepreneur

from a degenerate semi-socialist future had tried to

create a fairground display modelled on a late

twentieth-century capitalist shop, and failed,

through lack of imagination.

It wasn't convincing.I wasn't convinced.I was a

little shaken, too.Was this farce, this gloomy

sideshow trying to mimic the West - and not even

doing that very well - the best job the locals could

make of socialism?Maybe there was something so

basically wrong with them even the ship hadn't

spotted it yet; some genetic flaw that meant they

were never going to be able to live and work

together without an external threat; never stop

fighting, never stop making their awful, awesome,

bloody messes.Perhaps despite all our resources

there was nothing we could do for them.

The feeling passed.There was nothing to prove this

wasn't just a momentary, and - coming so early -

understandable aberration.Their history wasn't so

far off the mean track, they were going through

what a thousand other civilizations had gone

through, and no doubt in the childhood of each of

those there had been countless occasions when all

any decent, well-balanced, reasonable and

humanely concerned observer would have wanted

to do was scream in despair.

It was ironic that in this so-called Communist

capital they were so interested in money; at least a

dozen people came up to me in the East and asked

me if I wanted to change some.Would this

represent a qualitative or quantitative change?I

asked (blank looks, mostly). 'Money implies

poverty,' I quoted them.Hell, they should engrave

that in stone over the hangar door of every GCU.

I stayed for a month, visiting all the tourist haunts,

walking and driving and training and busing

through the city, sailing on and swimming in the

Havel, and riding through Grunewald and Spandau

forests.

I left by the Hamburg corridor, at the ship's

suggestion.The road went through villages stuck in

the fifties.The eighteen fifties, sometimes; chimney

sweeps on bikes wore tall black hats and carried

their black-caned brushes over their shoulders like

huge sooty daisies stolen from a giant's garden.I

felt quite self-conscious and rich in my big red

Volvo.

I left the car on a track by the side of the Elbe that

night.A module sighed out of the darkness, dark on

dark, and took me to the ship, which was over the

Pacific at the time, tracking a school of sperm

whales directly beneath and plundering their great

barrel-brains with its effectors while they sang.



4: Heresiarch



4.1:Minority Report

I should have known not to tell Li'ndane about

Paris and Berlin, but I did.I was floating in the AG

space with a few other people after a dip in the

ship's pool.I'd actually been talking to my friends,

Roghres Shasapt and Tagm Lokri, but Li was there,

eavesdropping avidly.

'Ah,' he said, floating over to wag one finger under

my nose. 'That's it.'

That's what?'

'That monument.I see it now.Think about it.'

'The memorial to the Deportation, in Paris, you

mean.'

'Cunt.That's what I mean.'

I shook my head. 'Li, I don't think I know what

you're talking about.'

'Ah, he's just lusting,' Roghres said. 'He pined

when you left last time.'

'Nonsense,' Li said, and flicked a blob of water at

Roghres. 'What I'm talking about is this; most

memorials are like pricks; cenotaphs;

columns.That monument Sma saw is a cunt; it's

even in a divide of the river; very pubic.From this,

and Sma's overall attitude, it's obvious that Sma is